About the only AI company currently alive that I’m sure will survive is CivitAI. Huggingface probably, too. Both are, in the end, in the datacenter business. Huggingface has exposure to VC BS in their client base, they might be in trouble if a significant number suddenly go belly-up but if they have any sense they’ll simply not overextend. And, well, they, too, can switch to cat pictures.

Yep that’s what nvidia marketing seems to be calling their denoiser nowadays. Gods spare us marketing departments.

Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They’re cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that’s, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.

And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won’t do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.

The trick to nixos, in this instance, is to use a python venv. Python dependencies are fickle and nasty in the first place, triply so when talking about fast-churning AI code, I tried specifying everything with nix, I succeeded, and then you have random comfyui plugins assuming they can get a writeable location by constructing a path from comfyui’s main.py. It’s not worth it: Let python be the only dependency you feed in, let pip and general python jank do the rest.

5500 here. I can’t use any recent rocm version because the GFX override I use is for a card that apparently has a couple more instructions and the newer kernels instantly crash with an illegal operation exception.

I found a build someone made buried in a docker image and it indeed does work, without override, for the 5500 but it’s using all generic code for the kernels and is like 4x slower than the ancient version.

What’s ultimately the worst thing about this isn’t that AMD isn’t supporting all cards for rocm – it’s that the support is all or nothing. There’s no “we won’t be spending time on this but it passes automated tests so ship it” kind of thing. “oh the new kernels broke that old card tough luck you don’t get new kernels”.

So in the meantime I’m living with the occasional (every couple of days?) freeze when using rocm because I can’t reasonably upgrade. Not just the driver crashes, the kernel tries to restart it, the whole card needs a reset before doing anything but display a vga console.

but they say that you should use the right pinky to reach every key towards the upper right end of the keyboard, which gets old fast given how frequently you need to access them.

I don’t do that either. I hit the rightmost stuff with the ring finger, some keys are on the middle finger. The return to home position thing is still important, though, the one place to measure all distances from. Also I learned touch-typing with dvorak which may or may not have had an influence.

Cursive is fundamentally less legible and harder work for most students to learn.

It’s way easier to read for dyslexics as q d b p all look actually different, not just flipped/rotated (which makes them the same thing, try it with a pair of scissors). I don’t know what they’re teaching in (I presume?) the US, but this is quite legible. There may be instances where it’s an undue burden, teachers here are trained to spot that and accommodate, just as they do with dyslexia where you’ll get two grades for spelling: One raw, and one with all the dyslexia-typical mistakes (but only those) calculated out.

Pencils, as said, are a good thing: Makes sure that you’re not using too much force. Re-sharpening the thing from scratch every other word gets annoying fast. If there’s coordination issues then that may be a problem but ultimately it’s probably better to bite the bullet and focus on training to not break the lead than it is to hand the pupil a ball point pen because then they’re bound to cramp up.

And just because you got me curious I tried to figure out what part of my body I’m writing with – and TBH aside form “right arm” I can’t really make it out because it’s all so interconnected and all over the place. I think up/down (the page) is mostly shoulder, and so is continuous left to right, while per-letter left-right and off/onto the page is a combination of underarm rotation and fingers. Never got taught explicitly how to do it, but I remember the primary school teacher occasionally telling kids how to not do it. There’s probably multiple ways to do it well.

Oh, and apparently I was wrong: My state did get rid of cursive, then results tanked, now they’ve re-introduced it, but only from year two on, and the ministry is waiting on data to come in. My guess is that they’ll re-introduce cursive from year one. Somehow all the previous generations didn’t have an issue using two different fonts at the same time: It’s not like our books were written in cursive. I doubt Gen Alpha will have. They may be cringe, but they’re not stupid.

I’ve used cheap mechanical pencils before but not expensive ones. How much better are more expensive mechanical pencils?

I’m not talking exclusive, here, koh-i-noor clutch pencils start at… wait no those are plastic ones and a ten set (30 Euro). Metal ones 4.50 Euros or such. Cheapest Staedler I’m seeing is 9 for metal, 5 for plastic. The real difference is the leads: No scratching, just pure smoothness, from either company. 2mm diameter x 12cm length, it’s a standard. Bought a handful for sketching purposes, you can actually use 6B leads in clutch pencils those would instantly break with modern mechanical pencils, and you can shape the tip, expose lots of lead to have lots of surface area, etc. I then went ahead and also used them for less artistic purposes. What you do have to get accustomed to is the lead falling straight down and out when you press the button if you don’t catch it with the table. Oh and bonus: Those 2mm leads also should fit your compass, just break off a piece and sharpen it.

I’d say they’re more like better wood pencils than mechanical ones with thin leads, where you have the choice between constantly breaking leads or using 0.9mm leads which are less likely to break, but you’ll be stuck with producing thick lines as sharpening them really is silly.

Forcing children with disabilities to do it

If we are making children do things we should be teaching them the correct way to do it, not half assing it.

…which includes cursive. Also for disabled folks, as far as possible: At that point you’re teaching fine motor mechanics first and foremost, secondly writing. How quickly they write is of no great consequence (or we’d be teaching shorthand), how well their motor skills develop is. The usual approach here is that you get a set cursive with a couple of options and alternative glyph shapes for the first four years, then you can develop from there as you wish. Some kids arguably should get more hand-holding in the “develop for yourself” part.

That you didn’t learn it the right way is a thing you can blame on your teachers, but not cursive. Like, I mentioned pencils and fountain pens, ball-point pens are outlawed in schools here: It’s so that kids don’t use pressure, which makes them not tense up and cramp, which makes developing proper technique way easier. Though if the coordination issues are sub-clinical they generally should be sorted out before primary school starts, that’s a job for the kindergarten, making sure that everyone has a proper baseline in physical, social, and language skills.

The trouble with fountain pens is that they don’t really expect you to not write for a month or two. The ones with built-in tank would be less annoying there as you can easily uncrust everything by pulling in some ink through the feather (is that what the tip is called in English? I have no idea), but their great downside is that when they make a mess, they make a real mess. Ink rollers you can put in a pocket without worrying and they don’t really dry out. Mostly though you don’t have to ram them into the paper to write.

Also, clutch pencils. Those mechanical ones that take leads that are as thick as usual wood-encased ones, and that you sharpen. If you ever have like 10 bucks burning a hole in your pocket get yourself some koh-i-noor clutch pencils and collection of leads (usual is HB but I’d suggest trying out 2B for writing), suitable sharpener (pencils come with an emergency one but it’s not too nice), as well as two tombow erasers: The ordinary one, and the dust catch one. Life’s too precious to waste nerves on shoddy leads and erasers. Also a Faber-Castel kneadable eraser: Even if you don’t draw it’s occasionally useful to be able to have a fine eraser tip. koh-i-noor leads are reportedly good enough for both artists and engineers and, truth be told, what could be a more perfect combination of endorsements. And, as said, like 10 bucks total.

Oh ball point pens. Last I heard one of the thing they do preserve in primary school over here is the good ole progression from pencil to fountain pen and sticking for that for the whole four years. Pencil because if you use too much force you break the thing without breaking it, it’s just annoying, and that’s the point, once they switch to fountain pens they’re not going to bend them. Also, cursive from the start. There’s important lessons about connecting up letters in there: Writing single letters properly is harder than cursive because on top of moving your pen over the paper, you have to lift it. Much easier if you already have proper on-paper movement down.

I am quite partial to ink rollers nowadays but still can’t stand ordinary ball points. They feel wrong.

Software is still jank. Well maybe except zfs and sqlite, but the rest is jank. Also seL4.

So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years,

That should literally never be the case. How do you even find your home position like that.

The quick and simple way to learn proper touch tying is simple: Use a typing tutor program. It really is all about writing random stuff without looking at your keyboard, that’s all there is to it, depending on layout what you write may make more or less sense. Do that until you can actually type blindly, if you need a refresher for symbols then do that, it’s worth the time investment, just for the love of everything don’t look at your keyboard and don’t ever rest your index anywhere but where you feel that they’re in the right position. Not some feel-good “feel” but those nubs on the keys (f and j on qwerty). feel them.

Perilous, eh. Threatening tales of impeding doom and destruction. Who are you actually trying to convince, here. I doubt it’s me I’d be flattered but don’t think you care enough.

If Roko’s Basilisk is forcing you, blink twice.

3840 * 1600 * 4B / 1024 / 1024 = 23.4375MiB for uncompressed RGBA (four bytes per pixel).

That is, even if that thing was pure random pixels and would have to be stored uncompressed and you’d use a completely useless alpha channel you still don’t hit 25M.

dismiss at your own peril.

Oooo I’m scared. Just as much as I was scared of missing out on crypto or the last 10000 hype trains VCs rode into bankruptcy. I’m both too old and too much of an engineer for that BS especially when the answer to a technical argument, a fucking information-theoretical one on top of that, is “Dude, but consider FOMO”.

That said, I still wish you all the best in your scientific career in applied statistics. Stuff can be interesting and useful aside from AI BS. If OTOH you’re in that career path because AI BS and not a love for the maths… let’s just say that vacation doesn’t help against burnout. Switch tracks, instead, don’t do what you want but what you can.

Or do dive into AGI. But then actually read the paper, and understand why current approaches are nowhere near sufficient. We’re not talking about changes in architecture, we’re about architectures that change as a function of training and inference, that learn how to learn. Say goodbye to the VC cesspit, get tenure aka a day job, maybe in 50 years there’s going to be another sigmoid and you’ll have written one of the papers leading up to it because you actually addressed the fucking core problem.

But that isn’t to say human intelligence can’t be surpassed by something distinctly inhuman.

Tell me you haven’t read the paper without telling me you haven’t read the paper. The paper is about T2 vs. T3 systems, humans are just an example.

Most turbo buttons never worked for that purpose, though, they were still way too fast Like, even ignoring other advances such as better IPC (or rather CPI back in those days) you don’t get to an 8MHz 8086 by halving the clock speed of a 50MHz 486. You get to 25MHz. And practically all games past that 8086 stuff was written with proper timing code because devs knew perfectly well that they’re writing for more than one CPU. Also there’s software to do the same job but more precisely and flexibly.

It probably worked fine for the original PC-AT or something when running PC-XT programs (how would I know our first family box was a 386) but after that it was pointless. Then it hung on for years, then it vanished.

And my point isn’t about where we’re at, it’s about how far the same tech progressed on another domain adjacent task in three years.

First off, are you extrapolating the middle part of the sigmoid thinking it’s an exponential. Secondly, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11633-017-1093-8.pdf

Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewable so not really, no. Having a good combination of starting materials to minimise the amount of energy you need to fuse everything together, or even starting out with something heavier, would be the way to go.

For more details ask a nuclear physicist of which I’m not one. Honestly there doesn’t seem to be much work on it.